I had a fairly enlightened dad, though if you looked at his resume, it might not seem that way. He was a chartered accountant for Price Waterhouse. He was strict, and we had a very ordered life. To this day, I am the least materialistic person I know, because my father didn’t raise me to just go out and buy this or that car.
My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.
I went to a physiotherapist, and she said something to me no one has ever said: ‘Sandi, you have plantar fasciitis, because you’re fat.’ I left and sat in my car shaking. She’d told me the truth, which no one else had. It was painful, but I needed to hear it.
I would love to fall in love and get married and have beautiful children. I mean that’s one of the goals in life, I think, to have, and it’s a beautiful thing. My sister has kids and all my friends have kids. They show me their, you know their report cards. And I can show them my sports car.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn’t find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write.
I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
I’m like, ‘Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn’t. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘Drive My Car?’ You weren’t on board for ‘Revolution 9’ or ‘Day In The Life,’ were you?’
In the summer of 2007, I was in New York for some meetings and… I rented a car and just drove to Staten Island to take a glance and remind myself about it. I ended up staying a couple of days there in a hotel and I’ve been all over the island several times since.
We used to think that aging was a lot like, as if we were cars made fresh and youthful and then we’ve entered this breakdown in diet. What we didn’t realize until recently is that we’re much more complex than a car. We fix ourselves if we’re broken.
Beijing was such a different city. There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles. I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.
I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.
On my job I end up jumping out of planes. Last week I got in an 18-wheeler and drove down a runway onto a skid track. The week before that they put me in a car and sunk me to the bottom of a lake to see if I could escape without an oxygen tank.
There is such a history and such a mystique around the name of Ferrari and the success that it has had. The whole imagery and legend of the red cars and what they mean to the world of automobiles and racing itself. It is hard to imagine F1 without them.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his ‘22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.
Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening – these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country’s market.
Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can’t get rid of violence.
I used to drive up and down Pacific Coast Highway in this black Porsche, and I had seen a couple of accidents on the highway involving Porsches. I realized if you’re in any kind of head on accident in one of those cars, they’re going to get you out of it with a can opener, one of those Jaws of Life.
When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory.
I know that BMW is now a sponsor of the USOC – of the United States Olympic Committee – so they offer the use of their aerodynamic speed-tunnel for testing and such for the athletes, which is a great advantage. But to be honest with you, I’d rather have a free car!
I’ve been offered, I think it was £300,000 to play live two concerts in London some years ago. And I said ‘No. No thanks.’ I would rather stay home here and change oil on my car, or collect some rotten wood from the forest, spread on my ruined former agricultural land.
The irony is that it was tougher to rent a car from Cerberus when it owned Alamo than to buy a semi-automatic. To rent a car, one had to provide ID, a drivers’ license, and get insurance coverage. To buy a gun? Cash and carry, from the back of a station wagon at a gun show. No concerns about downstream liability or risk.
When we advocate for violence against women to be eliminated on campuses, we say, ‘Well, actually, it’s not just on campuses we have to worry about.’ We might have to worry about high schools. We might have to worry about police precincts and cars. We might have to worry about public housing.
Some people treat seeing me as if they just won a car on ‘The Price is Right.’ The feet get going, and the hands start flapping, and it’s really quite amazing. It’s a little scary: you can’t have more than two or three of them at the same time because someone might get hurt. But it’s great fun.
Every pound that comes into the Exchequer was earned by someone through hard work, and could have been used for a new car, a holiday or a treat for the children. It means I have a responsibility to make sure that all public spending is justified.
In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don’t have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there’s a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.
